Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Six more classrooms were renovated this summer. We took this
opportunity to upgrade the control units which includes a new user
interface.
We will be hosting training in August to show you how the new
interface works. During this training we will also offer refreshers on
use of the old Smart Classroom technology as well as refreshers on use
of technology in Classrooms that have not yet been renovated. These
sessions are by appointment only. If you are interested in taking
advantage of these sessions, please sign up here.

Monday, July 29, 2013

New Responsive Theme and Variations + Upgrade from 2.3 to 2.5

Folks returning from the summer break in mid-August will notice some refreshing changes to the look of the various Moodles. Besides upgrading to a newer version of the software, we will be implementing a new look, or Moodle theme.

We have engaged a theme development firm to create a custom Moodle theme for Manhattan College. The theme (base theme + variations) is meant to complement the college's website. The theme variations will also help users better distinguish
between the various Moodle implementations at Manhattan College, e.g., course server (lms), community server (mcs), and development server).

Most notably, however, the new theme will be "responsive" to cater to
the amazing growth of mobile and tablet users. A responsive web design
(RWD) and layout approach allows a site to adapt to every user's screen
size needs, from the traditional desktop and laptop to the smallest
mobile phones. Our new Moodle theme is expected to deliver an optimal viewing experience - easy reading and navigation,
with a minimum of resizing and scrolling - regardless of the device used to access any of our Moodle servers.

Below is a mockup of the new theme:

Users will also find numerous features and
productivity improvements as part of the our Fall 2013 Moodle rollout.
Moodle.org releases new versions of the software every 6 months; Manhattan
College, like most other colleges, typically upgrades only over the
summer break. We have concluded our investigations and preliminary testing, and have decided to upgrade our
Moodle versions from 2.3 to 2.5.

We will be implementing and deploying our new custom theme and software upgrades over the next few weeks. We will be looking for faculty to perform user testing in our test environment to insure a good user experience this Fall.

Moodle - a widely distributed open-source learning management
system - is Manhattan College's current LMS. Manhattan College uses the CLAMP edition; CLAMP is a membership-driven collaborative effort to extend Moodle for use at liberal arts colleges through various tools, etc.

We are excited about all the new features and the new theme. Stay tuned for more to come!

How do I know if a site is responsive? Well, if you shrink
your browser, the content resizes to fit the available screen space. Try this with some sites on
your desktop or laptop to see if they are responsive - or check out the
following site to perform the responsive resize mambo.

Friday, July 12, 2013

It is with great pleasure that I inform you of the success of our transition to new database hardware this past weekend. We went to a different change in architecture, from Solaris SPARC chipset, to the X86-64 chipset. That may be hard to conceptualize, but one that will be easy to relate to is RAM. We went from 16GB of RAM on our old hardware, to 256GB of RAM. Along with numerous other improvements, our database hardware is now top of the line.

What does this mean to you? Well, this should mean a significant increase in the speed of your reports. In our testing, we have noticed tremendous increases in the speed at which the reports run.

We have also been working with Oracle and Ellucian to make sure that performance is at it’s maximum capabilities to ensure the most optimal registration ever. In our testing, we have registered 1100 students into self-service all at the same time, and no one was denied entry into a class. We were able to produce consistent results with this time and time again.

In the past we have taken the database down between the hours of 3am and 6am every night for backups. Due to our new technologies this will not happen anymore, so any late owls can work whenever they need, and students will have 24 / 7 access to Self-Service.

We have also set up a disaster recovery site at our colocation facility located in New Jersey. At this facility, we have an identical copy of our Production Database sitting there in case anything happens to the database hardware in RLC (e.g., we lose power, the machine fails for some reason, etc.). This is what is known as Oracle Active Data Guard. This will help ensure our 24/7 hour uptime.

We hope that the work we have completed will have a significant positive performance impact on your daily tasks.

We are currently investigating one known issue with our JasperNet Password change utility, and the Start.manhattan.edu email initialization page. We are confident that this issue will be resolved shortly.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

In order to better serve the community, the De La Salle and Jasper Client Services Offices have been consolidated into the Jasper Client Services Office. The De La Salle Office will no longer be a walk in service location. Accessing service via email and phone remain the same. You can reach us at its@manhattan.edu or extension 7973(718-862-7973).
Effective today the walk in locations are:
Jasper Hall Basement
Library 410
RLC 103